John Wall
Soar
Edition of 200. Uniquely fruitful duo, John Wall and Alex Rodgers beguile again with a brilliant batch of oily glitch-hop and processed vocals in ’Soar’, a book and CD from Antwerp’s finest publishing house, Entr’acte Just as we were caught out by their ‘Rafia Longer’ 7” in 2015, ’Soar’ finds pivotal London-based artist Wall recalling everyone from Lorenzo Senni to Vladislav Delay and Jay Glass Dubs in the piece’s viscous contours and pinched percussion, while Alex Rodgers supplies the pointed …
Contrapt
John Wall and Mark Durgan return after a lengthy absence with Contrapt. On Contrapt, they've created a fractured sound world woven together from improvisations that took place in the Utterpsalm Studio in London between 2012-15. The seven tracks on Contrapt are an attempt at imposing order, structure, and "expression" without meaning or intention, onto a huge amount of heavily edited sonic material.
Rafia Longer
John Wall, computer, editing sound manipulation. Alex Rodgers, voice, real and computer-generated, text-to-speech. Mastered by Jacques Beloeil. Edition of 200 copies "Wall and Rodgers’] last two collaborations have intermingled Rodgers’ leftfield drawling voice amidst microscopically-forged electronic tracery. The texts (by no means the arbitrary stream of consciousness they sometimes appear to be) have always felt more-or-less paramount, but that doesn’t equate to clarity, and in the first of…
Work 2006-2011
Wall and Rodgers have worked together informally and irregularly for the best part of two decades, but it has been since Wall took the leap into improvisation, roughly five years ago, that the potential for their collaborations to become something more solid has evolved. So the pair have worked together, either just informally in Wall's studio or out playing live gigs since 2006, and they have produced a body of material that Wall has then sculpted into the composition that appears on the CD. Th…
Work 2011 - 2014
John Wall, computer-generated sounds, severe editing, arrangement and composition. Alex Rodgers, voice, computer-generated sounds. This work was compiled from improvisations, independently-recorded fragments and pre-written texts over the specified period. A second edition of Work 2006 -2011 (E114) is also available. Mastered by Jacques Beloeil and John Wall.
This latest collaboration by electronic composer John Wall and his old sparring partner, poet Alex Rodgers, gets off to a terrific st…
139
Six untitled pieces compiled from improvisations recorded 2–3 July 2011 at Utterpsalm studio. The sound sample is an unused excerpt from the second recording session which took place on 14–15 September 2011 at Mark Durgan’s studio in Bristol. Edited by Mark Durgan.
Cphon
This single composition, lasting slightly over its 20-minute pre-set constraint, comes up just short of John Wall’s longest piece to date, ‘Fractuur’. Given its constructive process: the patient and precise piecing together of thousands of heavily worked minute samples, each one with the potential to exert a generative pull on the caring listener, demanding listening is our diet here. The reward: an intense engagement with a bizarre and various compositional soundfield whose restless agit…
Hylic
John Wall likes to deliver his work in small portions. Hylic is only 20 minutes long, but this third of an hour can keep you busy for much longer than that. These three tracks are not titled in continuation with the Constructions series, but they seem to come from the same working method. Wall has collected sound matter from four London-based free improvisers: trumpeter Matt Davis, electronician Knut Aufermann, percussionist Mark Sanders, and bassist John Edwards. Then he has obliterated …